The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  “You know we handle a lot of stuff.” He sighed. Blake nodded, encouraging. “Most of it is pretty benign, but none of it is meant for public consumption. The point is, these guys told me that they’ve been disposing of it in a responsible fashion, but then today I get a phone call…”

  Blake was absolutely motionless, watching.

  “…telling me that these guys have been dumping…Christ, I don’t know how to say this…”

  “Just say it.”

  “Christ!” Oily beads of perspiration welled on his forehead, made armpit-inkblot configurations that met in the middle of his back. “They were dumping straight into the Codorus Creek, okay? Straight into the Codorus, which runs straight into the Susquehanna River, which runs straight into God knows where!”

  “Calm down.” Blake said it as much to himself as to Leonard. He was running the facts through his mind.

  “I’m trying to be calm, but frankly, this is scaring me out of my wits!” Leonard railed, hearing himself lose control and trying to stop it and watching it go. “One boy is dead already…”

  “Ah.” The ante burgeoned. Blake brought a finger up, touched it to pursed lips.

  “…and another boy is all messed up; I think he might be poisoned or something…”

  “Okay.” Blake withdrew his finger, made a pacifying gesture that he aimed at Leonard. “Are those the only two involved?”

  Leonard stammered, his word flow unexpectedly dammed. “I…I think so. Yes. Except for their father. Well, one of their fathers…”

  “And he is?”

  “His name’s Pusser. He runs a salvage yard outside of Hellam—”

  “What I need,” Blake interrupted, “is precise information. Names and addresses. Do you know where the accident happened?”

  “Have you ever heard of a place called Black Bridge?”

  “No. But I’m sure somebody has. What I need from you”—and on this he was emphatic, leaning into Leonard as if the fate of the entire universe were at stake—“is specifics. Every single thing you know. In the order you know it.”

  He took a beat, looked into Leonard’s eyes, made sure that he’d connected. He had. “We can manage this situation,” he said. “There’s nothing that we can’t manage. As long as we act now, and nothing else goes wrong, we’re fine. Remember that.”

  Leonard looked honestly relieved. For the first time, he met Blake’s gaze completely. Blake saw gratitude there.

  But most important, he saw faith.

  “You did the right thing in coming to me,” Blake said. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, no problem.” Leonard nearly blushed.

  “Just get it all down on paper for me.”

  “Right now?”

  “No time like the present.”

  Leonard nodded and opened a drawer on the pastor’s desk, found a notepad. As he scribbled, Blake turned away, hard-weighing the possibilities. The worst thing that could possibly happen was a whiff of this hitting the public air.

  On the other hand, there was nothing that couldn’t be handled under cover of darkness.

  Nothing at all.

  “And, Harry?” he said, almost as an afterthought. “Not a word of this to anybody, right?”

  “Of course not! Christ!” Leonard told him.

  Of course not.

  Another article of faith…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The first shots came high and sharp, like blown-up paper bags detonating in the distance. The sound was not lost on the ever-vigilant ears of Bernard S. Kleigel: the Conscience of a Nation. It filtered up out of the woods at him as he burned the goddam backyard leaves. And boy-oh-boy did it tick him off.

  “God dammit, Billy! Stand still!” he hissed, straining to hear more. At the ready pile, his five-year-old froze: a miniature Michelin rubber boy, body dwarfed in his overstuffed Osh-Kosh jumper. Billy was no fool. One whiff of Dad’s voice and it was lay-low time in the leaf pile.

  Two more shots rang out. Small-calibre, twenty-twos. Bernie twisted the rake handle so hard it bowed, veins in his temples throbbing. One word sprang—neon, glowing—into his mind.

  Kids.

  At forty-six, Bernie Kleigel was a cardiac time bomb, a coronary car wreck waiting to happen. He was overweight and underworked, the kind of guy who pissed off easily and held grudges with the half-life of plutonium. He missed his misspent youth, resented the ceaseless ravages of middle age, had nothing but dread for the future.

  When Millie arm-twisted him into one of her wacko fad health regimens, it sucked what little fun was left to be had out of his midlife crisis. He quit smoking, gave up alcohol and caffeine and cholesterol, not to mention fried foods and sodium. His doctor was pleased, the quack bastard. Keep it up, he said, and Bernie’d live another forty years. Millie smiled and swore to it.

  Bernie was a man on the edge.

  And here were these kids, not knowing what they had, not realizing how goddam delicate and precious life was. Didn’t they realize they could blow their little goddam brains out with those things? Or maybe somebody else’s, “accidently”? Christ! When you got right down to it, in this world full of idiots, nobody was safe!

  Another shot came. Bernie pictured it vividly in his mind: a meat-spattered Rube Goldberg engine of destruction. He saw the bullet divot off the trunk of the tree, missing its intended squirrelly target by a mile. He saw it pinging off tree after tree, mindlessly searching for something delicate and precious to destroy…

  …and then he saw his own little Billy violently airlift backward, the top of his head a hot red horizontal rain of grease and gristle. He saw himself drop to his knees, deep in the throes of the anguish he knew he’d most certainly feel.

  “NOOOOO…!!!” he heard himself wail, while a million mournful worst-case scenarios rustled in his forebrain, just waiting for their chance to unfold…

  Not that any of this actually happened, of course. Just that it damn well could have. That was the thing that people never seemed to understand.

  Which was why the world needed Bernard S. Kleigel: the Conscience of a Nation.

  “Goddam sonofabitching kids,” he hissed: hunched up in his backyard, craning his neck, trying to get a fix on their location. Somewhere down the hill, by the sound of it. Off toward the sonofabitching creek.

  Which, technically, wasn’t his property, but that never stopped him from bitching about it. His two-acre plot of cleared ground bounded on the back of those woods, fercrissake! And it was posted, every goddam inch of it. NO TRESPASSING. NO HUNTING. NO KIDDING.

  Another shot popped off, reverberating through the tree line. Bernie threw the rake down like a gauntlet: the proverbial rake of doom. He’d have their butts—or their parents’ butts—up on charges so fast…!

  He stopped, in midtirade.

  And listened to the flurry of gunfire erupt: a frantic volley, riddling the country quiet like a string of cherry bombs. It lasted for only a few manic seconds.

  And then, just as suddenly, stopped.

  Bernie took a deep breath, felt the trip of his heart in his Adam’s apple. He scanned the tree line nervously, as if there were something to see. The only sound was the wind, moving through the trees like a thief through a sleeping man’s pockets.

  Suddenly, it all made perfect sense. He was just amazed that it hadn’t happened sooner. These were no ordinary hunters, he knew, laying down a suppressing fire against the birds and bunnies of the world. These were no ordinary kids.

  And there was only one thing to do.

  “Billy, get in the house,” he said. Billy just stared at him with huge blank eyes. “There are drug dealers out there, dammit! MOVE!”

  The Michelin boy animated, scattering leaves as fast as his five-year-old legs could carry him. Bernie followed, storming up to his modest split-level with the brick-face siding. He noted, in passing and sourly, that a few more of the brick faces had popped off, revealing the three layers of chicken-wire-reinforced cement. Goddam cheap siding, he thought. I ought
to sue the bastards! Whole goddam world is falling apart…

  Bernie stomped onto the back porch and clomped through the mudroom. In the kitchen, Millie was whipping up an Egg Beaters-and-cottage-cheese omelet.

  “Goddamned street gangs, right in our backyard!” he hollered. “I tell you, I won’t take this lying down!”

  “Of course not, honey,” Millie replied, on another frequency altogether. Lite FM 101 mental-flossed beautiful Muzak in her one ear and out the other: the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” as only 1001 Strings could play it. She smiled at him and shuffled across to the breakfast nook, her fuzzy slippers whuffing on the Congoleum. “I hope you’re hungry!”

  She slid the congealed mass out of the pan and onto a plate in front of him. He groaned and grabbed the phone, punched three digits with a practiced fury.

  “There’s gonna be some hell to pay,” he vowed. “And the devil don’t take checks!”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” she assured him, humming absently along with the tune.

  Downtown, County Control was a maze of glass-walled cubicles deep in the pale green cinder-blocked bowels of the Courthouse Building. County Control was the emergency services nerve center, linking seventy-three fire departments, forty-two ambulance companies, and fifty-five different police departments, most of them two-to-five-man borough forces.

  Half the counties in Pennsylvania didn’t even have 911 service, and wouldn’t for years to come, which put Paradise somewhat ahead of the pack. Still, Paradise County was a monument to bureaucratic provincialism: there was no county sheriff, no standardized training, no guarantee that any of its workers even talked to each other, no less shared vital job skills.

  A crew of eight ran the complex web of telephone, computer, and radio communications. It was a hodgepodge of state-of-the-art and prehistoric technology, the crazy-quilt survivor of a dozen pitched budget battles. It ran twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.

  At the moment, it was dead silent.

  That suited Dottie Hamm just fine.

  She’d just come on shift at eight: manning the Metro dispatch desk, a Spenser novel in one hand and a box of Dunkin’ Munchkins within easy reach of the other. A thirty-two-ounce Big Gulp of Diet Coke sat by the wayside, ready to soothe the inevitable parched throat.

  And Dottie was ready for action.

  Three other civilian police dispatchers were on duty, covering city, county, and rural zones. Across from the quad, Jerry and Jean worked the EMS and fire department lines. Carol ran warrant searches and APBs from her post near the supervisor’s office. Overstuffed file cabinets stood near an IBM mainframe, and the whole complex burbled with the quiet nattering of crosstalk, punctuated by beeps and the squelched bark of static.

  It was all music to Dottie’s ears. Sundays were like that. EMS would doubtless see a little action ‘round eleven. When area services finished, there was always some oldster seizing up with the spirit out at the Church of the Nazarene, or slipping on the stairs at Zion’s Gate and needing to be medevacced to glory. But generally, folks just hibernated; generally, it was just too damn cold to excite the criminal element.

  Warm snap days, on the other hand, were wild cards. Anything could happen.

  Days like today, for instance.

  Dottie had worked the second shift weekends for going on eight years. She was a sweet-faced, potato-shaped woman with a cool head, a balming manner, and almost infinite patience.

  Until Bernie Kleigel called.

  His name came up on her video monitor seconds after Kelly routed it. The monitor was a part of the enhanced 911 system, instantly displaying origin information, special stats, and call history for any number.

  Dottie saw KLEIGEL, and her molars ground together.

  Some wiseass had typed “10-96” under it. 10-96 was codeslang for nutcase. The wiseass was her. And the call-history list confirmed the diagnosis. Every couple of days, regular as clockwork: Kids in woods. Dogs barking. More kids. Noisy trucks. Kids, kids, kids…

  Dottie closed her eyes and saw the list extending clear back to infinity. They’d never seen his face, but his nasty nasal voice was woefully familiar. Taking a call from Bernie was like lancing a boil with your teeth.

  She picked up the phone, brushed a fleck of powdered sugar from her blouse. “Metro dispatch…” she sighed, resigned to her fate.

  “Dammit, there’s a WAR going on down here!”

  Dottie rolled her eyes. Dave Dell looked up from his desk on the other side of the glass, then caromed back in his swivel chair and froze: red face grimacing horribly, hands locked in a throttling deathgrip around his throat. She recognized the symptoms at once. He was having a Kleigel attack.

  “Now, Mr. Kleigel…” she began, stifling her laughter with professional aplomb. She had to be strong: Kleigelitis was a terribly contagious disease.

  “Don’t ‘now Mr. Kleigel’ ME!” he barked, his voice a razor of rusty tin. “They’re having some kind of shooting match down there. It sounds like a drug-related gang war to me! I coulda been KILLED, fercrissake!”

  Dave gave the notion a vigorous thumbs-up. “Well, we certainly wouldn’t want that,” Dottie said.

  “Yeah, well, you better get somebody out here before someone DOES get hurt!”

  “I’ll send someone out right away.”

  “You goddam well better!” Bernie groused, still chewing the bone. “I pay my taxes and I—”

  “Someone will be right out. Just sit tight,” Dottie concluded, yanking Bernie’s plug.

  “You fucking dickhead,” Dave appended, busting Dottie up.

  “Your mouth!” she gasped; Dottie didn’t take to cussing. “Oh my,” she sighed. “It’s too early for that guy!”

  “You got that right!” Dave nodded, throwing his pencil up to stick in the ceiling tile. He flipped his shoulder-length blond hair back and assumed a more contemplative pose: arms behind his head, feet up on the low bookshelf that held the code manuals. “So who gets the honors this time?”

  “Bernie’s on RD 23,” Dottie said. “Hellam Township.”

  “Oooh, Adam-sixty,” Dave checked the roster sheet gleefully to see who was on duty. “That’s Hal. Oh, he’s gonna love this.” Dave loved to give Hal shit.

  Dottie time-stamped the call card. “Nine thirty-six. He’s probably out on rounds by now.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Dave smirked and reached through the sliding glass partition that separated their desks. He filched another donut hole. “Hal’s rounds are glazed, with sprinkles.”

  “Now, don’t start.” Dottie glanced balefully at her own diminishing snack supply as she keyed the mike transmit button. “Metro to Adam-sixty…Metro to Adam-sixty, do you copy? Come in, please.…”

  Dave leaned back in his chair, gazing up at his still-embedded pencil. His lines were quiet. Later on things would likely liven up: some drunk and disorderlies; a fight maybe. Probably an accident or two.

  With any luck, the day would not portend much worse than a morning rant from Bernie the crank. Dave reached through the partition to steal another doughball. Dottie slapped him playfully, kept on paging till she got through.

  “Adam-sixty here,” a voice came over the radio. “What’s up, dispatch?”

  “Uh, yeah,” she began. “We’ve got a complaint on shots fired in the Black Bridge area…”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WPAL was the area’s NBC affiliate, located downtown in a two-story brick building on south Beeker Street. It was a medium-market station, with a staff of thirty and a fifteen-hundred-foot tower on nearby Mt. Hope, to better serve the tri-county broadcast area.

  Most weekdays, it was a bustling little pressure point.

  Weekends were another story.

  It was 10:12 a.m. At the moment, the Studio A control room was a ghost town. John Bizzano, the day shift engineer, slumped in the control chair, half-dozing under the funny papers as he kept things nominally on the air. Sunday Today with Maria Shriver played silently on Monitor O
ne. CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt was on Monitor Three. Jerry Falwell preened in the center on Monitor Two, tumescent and smug. And nobody was watching any of them.

  Downstairs, in the editing booth, the real show—The Kirk Bogarde Show—was on.

  Mike Clifford and Laura Jenson crammed into folding chairs, facing the console in a room so small they could choke on each other’s fumes. Kirk paced in place behind them, excited by his own televised presence. He was twenty-five and fresh out of Brown, the only son of second-generation monied liberal Republicans. Ma and Pa Bogarde had groomed their baby boy for success, and it was damn well going to happen.

  Not that Kirk didn’t work at it. His Protestant ethics were firmly in place, and he burned for his shot. Five-ten, lean and salon-tanned, he had meticulously cultivated the sandy-haired, blandly handsome yuppie-drone persona that the networks craved, retaining just enough edge to set him apart from the pack.

  He wore khaki Levi’s dockers with red suspenders, a Ralph Lauren button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to masculine mid-forearm, and loafers with little tassels. He toned up with Nautilus and honed his killer instinct three times a week on the racketball courts at the Athletic Club.

  Kirk had his program down: give him ten years and he’d have his own show, give Geraldo a run for his mustache.

  Laura’s ambitions, on the other hand, were substantially less showbiz in tone. That was probably why she liked Sundays so much. NBC carried the AFC doubleheader, which meant the six o’clock news was preempted, which meant no broadcast until eleven and a skeleton crew on board. It gave her plenty of time, as weekend assignment editor cum news director, to catch up: to clean shop; to put together the ubiquitous “evergreen” segments, the human-interest and seasonal filler that they always needed and never had enough of; in short, to take care of all manner of unfinished business.

  And, of course, to program the eleven o’clock edition.

  It had been a pretty dead weekend, news-wise. If nothing better happened, they’d end up carrying the network lead as their own, an extra minute on weather to cover last night’s storm, and a good eight minutes for sports, replete with the obligatory highlights and wrap-ups.